The prison in Green Bones the movie is introduced from the air, informing us of its uniqueness and expanse. This is not Bilibid or the city jail-like claustrophobia of many other prison movies. This is more like the real-life Iwahig Penal Colony in Palawan, which takes an al-fresco approach to incarceration, where inmates engage in farming and other productive activities to prepare them for release into the free world. 

On one level, Green Bones is about individual redemption, and the revelations about the main character, the crazed-killer inmate Domingo Zamora superbly played by  Dennis Trillo.

But seen through one man’s tormented prison time, Green Bones can also make us think about how society can redeem itself — the sweeping aerial shot juxtaposed with the tight closeup of a killer’s face. 

Domingo Zamora is a victim of injustice, but all his prison dormmates each represent a failure of society. The sweet simpleton portrayed by an aged Ronnie Lazaro even finds a way to return to prison — after his release into a world hostile to ex-cons. Besides, prison is where his buddies and pet cat are. 

Meanwhile, it’s the prison authorities who are conspiring to commit murder, while falsely accusing an inmate of plotting an escape. It’s an easily believable plot line in a society marred by the everyday lawlessness of law enforcers doubling as law breakers. 

The evil of power trampling on the powerless is a timeless theme. But it has a timely resonance in a year of outrageous real-world exposés. QuadComm hearings in Congress about thousands of killings in the name of a drug war have exposed treachery on an epic scale, fixing the nation’s attention in recent months more than any movie. 

I don’t want to stretch the parallels too far, but at its best cinema makes us reflect on our own human experience. As a journalist, I covered the drug war and was appalled by the oft-repeated flimsy alibi of “nanlaban” for cold-blooded crime. As bodies piled up, what was obvious to everyone was denied by many. 

That kind of gruesome magic realism in real life is hard to match by anything fictional. 

Green Bones offers a mirror of our dystopia but also an escape. The brooding villain-hero Domingo inhabits an alien consciousness as a deaf-mute, silently scrutinizing his prison milieu while poised to explode. His surprising true persona is the flip side of his record as a petty thief convicted of a heinous crime. Ruru Madrid is the naive rookie prison guard on the cusp of being swallowed up by the system, before his own moment of clarity. 

Prisons in real life are fertile ground for compelling stories, as every journalist knows. But as a microcosm of society, they can also provide lessons for reform. After seeing Green Bones, the documentarist and my colleague Kara David was inspired to produce a tutorial on reporting on prisons, recalling her wealth of stories, including “Lola sa Laya” about 91-year-old Lola Petra, one of the oldest inmates ever. The advocacy for her release led to her parole, a triumph for the elderly everywhere. 

Watch the "Lola sa Laya" documentary here: https://youtu.be/IThuVkcB478?si=L47TyZLnitwLPiEV

I remember my own immersion in city jails where I learned about the low level of literacy among male inmates. That reflected the consistently high national dropout rate among boys at the elementary level. Female students tended to graduate at much higher rates than males at all levels of education, from elementary to college. The result has been much fewer opportunities for well-paying jobs for many men, and the appeal of a life of crime that often leads to early death or prison. That clarified for me the urgent need to examine how boys in particular were being educated. 

One of the more heart-warming prison scenes I’ve witnessed was the literacy program in Bilibid where many inmates have learned how to read. I was the commencement speaker there once where I told the graduates that literacy was a form of freedom that could never be taken away. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the makers of Green Bones cut their teeth as nonfiction storytellers. My colleagues in GMA Public Affairs who produced, conceptualized and co-wrote Green Bones, respectively — Nessa Valdellon, JC Rubio, and Anj Atienza — are all veterans of journalism shows that seek to change our society for the better. Even Green Bones director Zig Dulay previously helmed at public affairs shows that featured edifying true stories. 

All of us who have worked in journalism have produced stories that were so preposterous, awful, or strangely wonderful that we could declare, “You can’t make this up…” 

Green Bones is one story they made up but their storytelling roots are showing.